What's all this talk about Obama being a socialist?Why do they Hate Obama and FDR?Right-Wing Ideology and Political EconomyBy Chip Berlet

For the economic conservatives and right-wing libertarians, Obama is leading America down the slippery slope towards socialism, collectivism, and tyranny, just like FDR in the 1930s.

For the Christian Right, Obama is creating the type of Big Government that is a sign of the collectivist One World Government forged by the antichrist in the End Times.

Together, these two sectors have launched a campaign against socialism and Satan--which means stopping the Obama Administration from making changes in the economic system to benefit the majority of Americans. It also means reesisting the so-called collectivism and tyranny of labor unions--in this case, opposition to the Card Check legislation that Obama has promised to sign.

Economic conservatives and right-wing libertarians

To supporters of rigid Laissez Faire unregulated capitalism, Big Government and collectivism are threats to the very survival of the U.S. economy. This is tied to the idea of “rugged individualism” which is a “core American cultural value”, that is “especially significant in the American psyche”1

Darwinism spawned Social Darwinism, which spawned Economic Darwinism, which takes the idea of the survival of the fittest in nature and imposes it on economic systems by arguing that fierce and unregulated competition builds individual character and national economic health.2 While Social Darwinism is “a secularist philosophy”, it is influenced by “a kind of naturalistic Calvinism,” writes Hofstadter. Calvinism strongly influenced the early American outlook.3 In this form of Calvinism, according to Hofstadter, “man’s relation to nature is as hard and demanding as man’s relationship to God under the Calvinistic system”.4 In some sectors of the Christian Right in the United States, there has been a return to early Calvinist doctrine.

The relationship between libertarian Laissez Faire Capitalism and Calvinist forms of Protestantism was explored by Weber in his classic book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Popular tracts from the early Twentieth Century still circulate in the United States warning that the federal income tax is theft and that the Federal Reserve banking system is a corrupt plan to loot the economy hatched by secretive elites on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. These ideas continue to be repackaged by right-wing groups. In the 1960s and the 1970s these claims appeared as conspiracy theories peddled by the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby.

When President Roosevelt was elected President in 1933 he increased the size and role of the federal government significantly. Libertarian and Laissez Faire ideologues were outraged. To counter this new role for “Big Government”, associations of manufacturers and corporate executives spent millions of dollars to distribute “educational” materials warning that a bloated federal government was the road to collectivism, communism, and tyranny.

Economic libertarianism was a bedrock assumption of the American political economy up until the Franklin Roosevelt Administration of 1933 to 1945. Right-wing ideologues still claim that Roosevelt sent the country marching down the road to socialism.

After World War Two, conservative activists led by William F. Buckley, Jr. launched a campaign to rollback the size of the federal government. This became a major rhetorical goal of the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.

The Christian Right

Christian Right leader Tim LaHaye, for example, claims it was the Satan himself who engineered the “crafty election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president for twelve years.”

This was part of a secret conspiracy to turn the “American constitution upside down,” in order to “use our freedoms to promote pornography, homosexuality, immorality, and a host of evils characteristic of the last days,” states LaHaye, in an open reference to the apocalyptic End Times prophesied in Revelation. 9 In another article, LaHaye also believes that the “Anti-Christ philosophy already controls America and Europe.”10

LaHaye asserts that: “All thinking people in America realize an anti-Christian, anti-moral, and anti-American philosophy permeates this country and the world.”11 The subversive conspirators include godless secular humanists and others who secretly manipulate the news media, the entertainment industry, the universities, and even the court system. These evil forces have turned the “American constitution upside down,” warns LaHaye.12 “I have no question the devil is behind what the apostle Paul called ‘the wisdom (philosophy) of this world’ and controls many of our courts and other areas of influence,” LaHaye writes.13

According to LaHaye, the liberal, secular humanist, antichrist conspiracy:

dominates the public school system from kindergarten through graduate school. It controls the media from the daily print press to popular magazines (from porno to mainline), the six major TV networks, most of all cable TV; it dominates the entertainment industry, and it elects a predominance of liberals to both parties in our national government.

This alien philosophy does not come from the Bible, but is antithetical to it. In this country it flies under the banner of “liberalism,” but in reality it is atheistic socialism at best and Marxism at worst.

We are the only nation that can halt the socialist Marxist enthronement of the UN as THE GLOBAL GOVERNMENT of the world, but it will require a conservative administration and Supreme Court committed to judicially interpreting our nation’s laws that were originally based on moral Biblical principles.14

2 Hofstadter (R.), Social Darwinism in American Thought , reprint edition, Boston: Beacon Press, [1955] 1992; Bannister (R.), Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1979; Degler (C.), In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991.

3 Zakai (A.), Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Hatch (N.O.), The Democratization of American Christianity, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989.

8 This section is in part drawn from Berlet (C.), “The new political right in the United States: Reaction, rollback, and resentment”, in Thompson (M.) (éd.), Confronting the new conservatism: The rise of the right in America, NYU Press, New York, 2007.